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There are a number of poems in my book (Any Psalm You Want) in which I reference certain pieces of music. I thought it would be helpful to share them with you to accompany what was written in the book. It may add some context and color, though it may be better to read the poems before hearing the songs. Either way, here goes:

Once I was six, or seven, and accepted a darefrom my uncle to crawl into the dryer. I latergot a beating for it, not because I had gone inbut because I had broken the dryer door uponclimbing out, in fear that my uncle would haveactually turned on the dryer and left me tumblingin flame. Even now, when I think of you, I knewnothing of the depth to which a child could feelalone in the dark, though I was the same age asall of you when you died, despite that even thenI had already learned how little your loved onescan guard you from even the faintest imitationsof a devil. If he had actually left me in there, turnedthe knob, pressed the button, listened to me tumbleand scream, maybe then I would understand the musicthat followed you to the floor, in your classroom,your teachers loyal guardians already gone. If I couldhave bartered with God before that morning, had Hepromised that a deal was eternal with pricked thumband trading of blood, I would have rewound myselfbeyond every night when my chest leapt in someséance of joy, before I’d ever found myself worthlifting, sewing up and forgiving, I’d have rewoundto a quiet night in the dryer, the last hour of my life,listened to my uncle’s footsteps fade, my vocal cordsunwilling, unable to betray a sound.

My dad, once every several years, finds himselfreminiscing on the days when my adolescentself was obsessed with death, asking over and overfor him to take me to the cemetery until he finallydid and my body became a walking pillar of ice,and during this telling I wonder if he remembersthe time when I was five and he was strugglingto fix something in the car engine and I pointedto something he can’t now recall, telling him,there, there. To this day neither of us knows howI knew, nor who may have whispered to me fromsomewhere I’d one day learn to fear, and fear, untilI didn’t, and don’t, and now whisper back to wheneverstrapping myself into a rising plane, eyes fixed throughthe window, waiting for the white blindness, the swarmof clouds cloaking us all in its throat.

You didn’t know at the time, but the firsttime Django saw you, since the separation,was when they pulled you out of the hot box,screaming from the water they hurled ontoyour nude body to wake you up, screamingas they carried you into the house. At somepoint, while you are lying together in bed,married, free, he will summon the will toask what had been done to you. His throatwill swell as if downing a full grown apple.His fingers will reflexively wrap around a gunthat is not there, not in bed, but sitting in its holsterwith the pants on the floor. He will ask youof this out of love for you, in honor of yourstory, for somehow you had survived as steeledas him. He will ask how long you were forced to lay in thelaps and arms of evil men, how many timesyour skin was forced to heal by growingon top of itself, in lines of lash.When you look at him, finally, deciding what snippetof hell to offer as an answer, I imagine you willtell him about a moment when you’d smiledin the box, when the dark and hot had molded itselfinto a body, had wrapped around her as if tryingto speak her skin correctly for the very first time.

How many times did your tonguewarp around itself before correctlyuttering her name? Broomhilda.Broomhilda. Broomhilda. Baby.Sweetness. Trouble maker. Pearl.Did she teach you how to press outthe r as if exhaling a snort of poppies?Did she teach you how the h cradlesthe il as a deaf infant while runningfor shelter in a rainstorm? Broomhilda.Broomhilda. Broomhil—shh…it’s okaybaby. You good. You smell me just fine.

1You’re holding the newspaper in your hand as if you plan to strangle it.Why do they tell you these stories of black boys dying if no oneplans to actually do something about it? Why must they stormyour mornings with this? Are they sick?

2The last time a white woman clutched her purse in your presenceyou nearly punched her. You nearly told her how that shit stompsyour heart. You did nothing. Black fist paralysis.

3You remember what your friend said the other day,about the service, the new gift of manufactured amnesia,the intravenous deliverance of eternal sunshine,how they give you pills, you’re out cold and they sneak into your house to hook up a computer to your brain and erase whatever you wish. Two weeks later you saw him prove it, as you both watched your favorite movie and he burst out laughing at the punch linesboth of you had for a decade known by heart.

4You know there was an age at which you knew nothingof the ramifications of brown skin. You don’t remember whatage it was, but you want it to be now. Now. Now.

5The pills they gave you are in your hand. Your lights are off.Your watch blinks. They’ll be here in an hour.

6How many days has it been? You don’t know for sure but youhaven’t picked up a newspaper in three weeks. The headlinesare confusing; they seem like a foreign language.

7It’s July 4th, and you don’t know why everyone picked todayto light fireworks, but you’re falling in love with the sky.

8It feels like you smile too much. No one smiles back at you honestly.They’re warding you off. You don’t know what they’re ashamed of.

9Your cousin is staring at you incredulously, after you’ve calmly toldhim you don’t know Malcolm X’s birthday. His hands bite your shouldersas they ask where is your pride?!

10You get a phone call about your cousin being beaten by cops. Your first question is did he have a weapon? Was he assaulting someone?Was he on drugs and out of his mind? You never ask if his skinwas too dark that day for somebody’s mood, you never ask if he’dbeen pulled over for being too safe of a driver. It never occurs to youto ask anything like this. All you feel is pain, for one man beingharmed by another man. There is no history to complicate theimpulse of compassion.

11You’re at the nursing home, seeing Grandma. Her caretaker kindlytells you that you and she share the same smile. Like somethingin your heart has lifted up. As if this is no longer the world whereyour lungs belong.

When old man Stephen first laidhis eyes on you, his frown layingroses on the path to his scowl, itwasn’t because of your youth, orsome half-wrought indignantwhere’d you buy that beautiful horse?,but rather because 78 years of prostrationhad suddenly returned to singe his face.How surely, how confidently you rodeyour magnificent beast, as if throughservitude and escape it had always belongedto you.